Is responsive design overhyped?

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Over the last six years, we have seen a major shift in the use of mobile phones for both businesses and consumers. What had been a device strictly used for making calls and checking e-mail is now a lifeline linking people to their work and private lives through connected services.

The expectation of users today is that they will be able to leave their desks and continue to stay connected in some capacity via their phone. As a result of this shift in technology and expectations, Web traffic from mobile devices has skyrocketed. According to Cisco, traffic from wireless and mobile devices will exceed traffic from wired devices by 2016. This means that businesses—whether marketing to consumers, the enterprise or anyone in between—must have a strategy for making their services and websites mobile.

In the mobile Web development community, few words get thrown around as much as “responsive design.” This technique allows you to build a single site that can be viewable on any screen size and respond to it accordingly to provide an optimal experience for that device. The technique has garnered significant buzz, with its most ardent proponents claiming it as the Holy Grail of mobile Web design.

Well, as with anything, it has its limitations. Should your business utilize responsive design? The answer is that it depends.

Consider www.newsgator.com and www.pittsburghkids.org. Both are well-constructed responsive sites that are easy to browse on any screen size. Clicking around, you will find they are similar in navigation style, providing long scrolling screens of content when displayed on a phone. They do not have a ton of interactive content, just a couple contact forms with some filtering and embedded maps.

If you look under the hood, the load sizes for the NewsGator and Pittsburgh Children’s Museum homepages are 1.9MB and 1MB, respectively. This demonstrates the compromise that has to be made for responsive sites: Either they have large downloads, or trimmed-back functionality on full-sized browsers. With mobile bandwidth improving every day, it is not a huge concern, at least in developed markets, but anything less than a 4G connection would take some time to download an almost 2MB homepage.

An alternative option to responsive design is the dedicated mobile website. This tried-and-true technique provides mobile devices with their own interface separate from what is displayed on a desktop. While this does mean two separate codebases for a website, it also means greater control over the user experiences on both sides.

Consider Facebook.com and ESPN.com. These sites, built with dedicated mobile websites, have a much bigger digital footprint with significantly more content. These examples relate better to internal, back-office applications rather than external, public Internet sites.